THEATRE
Puppet master
HILARY SPURLING
The Cry of the People for Meat (Bread and Puppet Theatre at the Royal Court) The Last Chance Saloon (La Mama Troupe at the Arts)
It is curious to compare the excitement, not to say awe, roused on all sides by the Living Theatre on their visit to the capital with the condescension accorded for the most part to the comparatively modest Bread and Puppet Theatre from New York. Both companies are strolling players; both eschew language—what few words they use being almost invariably banal—in favour of elaborate visual and physical imagery; and much the same pacific, non-conformist and anti-materialist gospel. But, if anything is needed to bring home the disingenuousness of the Living Theatre—who, whatever their aims may once have been, now apparently take small interest in anything but a crude, cynical and hugely successful exploitation of commercial values—it is the imaginative delicacy of Peter Schumann's entrancing Bread and Puppets.
The Cry of the People for Meal is a ramshackle. episodic entertainment, moving at a fast clip through Old and New Testa- ments and designed for performance on the street. Vast, gaudy, tiptilted puppets lum- ber and dip about the stage. They have the papery charm of bulk without weight, the gaiety, wit and ruthlessness—note the dreamlike ease with which, when these creatures are displeased, huge knobby hands on poles reach out to knock their victims flat—of a gargantuan Punch and Judy show. And the patronising loftiness with which the company has been received is based in part, no doubt, on a confusion between real and counterfeit folk art. In one sense, this company's work is genuinely naive—hence the puppet masters' unself- consciousness. their quaint absorption, the cries of delight when. say. a rich and bloated Uncle Sam fails to make the eye of the needle while the poor man (wearing, per- haps inevitably in an experimental theatre group, the mask of a Vietnamese peasant) scuttles meekly through to laughter from the crowd.
This sly, nippy hero is a favourite of the company. For, in so far as The Cry of the People is primitive, it is hard, dry, un- sentimental and perfectly free from the spurious 'earthiness' commonly associated with our own notions of a romantic, rural past. On the other hand, of course, Mr Schumann is not a peasant; both his com- pany and his Harlem audiences, however artless they may be, however uneducated in general and unaccustomed to theatrical conventions in particular, nevertheless exist in the highly sophisticated context of urban New York. So that even their simplicity is often disconcerting: an imperialist soldier, menacingly equipped with all the resources of the us army, is suddenly gunned down —again to laughter from the crowd—by the same meek, placid, trigger-happy oriental who played the poor man in the parable.
Meekness is a virtue much practised by this company—hence the sombre power and beauty of their Sermon on the Mount— and very far removed from its traditional Victorian connotations of servility and pious weakness. On the contrary. For the Bread and Puppets (and no doubt for the poor of Harlem). meekness is a formidable mixture of irony, resilience and low cun- ning. It is. in short, precisely the quality which Brecht so much admired in peasants; and the comparison clearly illustrates the distinction between Mr Schumann's ap- proach and Brecht's to ways of pleasing working class audiences—or, for that mat- ter, between Mr Schumann's dolls and the stuffed sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, with which these saggy. bulging, warped and buckled puppets have a clear affinity. The difference is that, though the visual imagina- tion behind the Bread and Puppets is as rich and no less complex than the allusive `literary' sophistication of Brecht or Olden- burg, the effect is. so to speak, unfiltered. Take, for instance. Mr Schumann's masks for Noah's animals: the image—a heaving mass of blunt white muzzles, here and there a protruding snout or fang—has the drowsy and malevolent vacuity of a mediaeval carving; or watch the company as Herod's army, baulked of their prey by the flight into Egypt, scrabbling and poking at their faces so that we see the squashed cheeks, lopsided noses, squinting, spiteful eyes of stone gargoyles done in human flesh. But whether or not one has ever seen a gothic cathedral is neither here nor there; this is an art, not of pastiche or distillation, but which directly taps the source of the original, using the same means for the same ends with extraordinary assurance.
`I build [puppets] not as sculpture but actors', says Mr Schumann. Witness his Roman sentry, strutting before the gates
of Bethlehem to the accompaniment of a grotesque, gargling violin, and whose mask (comprising head and helmet) is a
miraculous construction—monstrous for the way in which its flat curves and stubby, thrusting nosepiece express a baleful, brutish cruelty; beautiful for the force and clarity with which it simultaneously conveys and passes comment on its subject. If the sentry is an incomparable image of armed thuggery, then the 'Grey Ladies of Bethlehem'—timid heads lolling on bean- pole bodies, grimy wigs, sackcloth dresses, nervous, furtive gestures—brilliantly express fear and deprivation. We have seen the misery of the Vietnamese people (with whom these 'grey ladies' are clearly identi- fied) portrayed often enough on the stage, generally in vague, conventional terms which effectively dull an audience's re- sponse; it is a mark of singular imaginative boldness to settle instead, as Mr Schumann does, on the dingy squalor, the physical and mental exhaustion, of an occupied people. The same boldness informs the Last Sup- per, which is the masterpiece of this pro- duction. There is an austere solemnity about this composition of subdued colours and dull textures, the bare table and the way in which the faces round it—faces of prig or hypocrite, a gaunt, morose, fanatical Arab, a vapid negro whose teeth seem al- most to dribble through his grin—appear to change under the play of light as the puppets shift in their seats, or lean forward one by one to take the sacraments. What is impressive is the fact that the passionate gravity of the disciples breaking bread coexists, as after all it must have done, with the sanctimonious, mean and commonplace expressions so clearly delineated in their features. And, when the play ends and the puppets collapse, the human actors running from the table seem curiously shrunk, like dwarfs. their voices shrill and feeble.
Beside the concentrated horror of this image. the company's faults—diffuseness, lack of focus. the clumsy and freakish light- ing—scarcely matter, and come in any case from the fact that, being accustomed to play in daylight in the middle of a crowd, they are ill-adapted to a plushy indoor theatre. But their second programme, which opened
on Monday, abandons puppets for a maw- kish infantility and, unlike The Cry of The People, may readily be missed.
Meanwhile Plexus II, an offshoot of the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, has the energy and sharp humour we have come to expect from these bold, inventive off-off Broadway companies, and also unhappily their usual trouble with words. There are
two charming performances from Michael Brody and John Bottoms, but the text (The Last Chance Saloon by Andy Robinson) —when it leaves, as it too often does. the wilder shores of riarody—is depressingly insipid and confused.
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